Welcome to the immortals' club

时间：2019-03-02 12:08:00166网络整理admin

By Greg Klerkx MY BRUSH with immortality began almost by accident. Late last year, rumours began to drift through my email inbox that some of the entrepreneurs who had backed the Ansari X prize – which I had been writing about for years – were working on a new project. They were helping to develop and fund an institute to solve the “problem” of death, called the Institute of Biomedical Gerontology. At first I didn’t really give it much thought. True, I have recently turned 40, but generally I feel young and fit enough not to care too much about my mortality. And in any case, the fanciful idea you can actually extend a life by more than a few years is surely best confined to science fiction. It must be bunkum. But then, a few months later, another email arrived. A friend wrote to tell me about a new book by futurologist Ray Kurzweil, a man I had long admired. Back in the 1980s, Kurzweil predicted that the internet, then an obscure government communications network, would rise to global dominance. He went on to invent the flatbed scanner, among many other things, and win the US National Medal of Technology. Impressive credentials indeed. But now it looked as if he had gone too far. In his new book, he was predicting that the next big thing would be nothing less than eternal life. And that’s not all: he had a recipe to achieve it. I couldn’t help but be struck by the coincidence, and it wasn’t a happy one. OK, recent years have been peppered with discoveries that have slowly begun to illuminate the mechanisms of ageing,